On
Monday, Sept 29, the American public witnessed firsthand the utter ineptitude
of the United States House of Representatives, hitting Main Street directly
in the pocketbook. While leaders try to figure a way out of an impending
economic crisis, it is now clear for everyone to finally see that we
have an equal crisis in political leadership.

In
my efforts to help secure health freedom for all Americans I have had
a number of interactions with Congress in the past few years and have
reached the following conclusions:1) The Senate is made up of multi-millionaires who
maintain power by accepting and granting favors. Those with large amounts
of money, such as the Big Pharma lobby, mostly get what they want even
though the American public is typically shafted in the arrangement.
Senators don’t need their paychecks; they get high on brokering
power and facilitating deals to the highest bidder, based on whichever
political party is most in control and who their friends may be.2) While the House has some entrenched multi-millionaires
who operate like those in the Senate, most members of the House are
not the cream of any crop and could not make as much money in the private
sector as they are being paid by their position in the House of Representatives
(which includes a retirement plan that would be the envy of every American).
Most of these people desperately need their paychecks and will do almost
anything to keep them coming.

Collectively,
Congress behaves more like a high school click with a cult-like method
of keeping its members in line, than representatives of the people.

As
the House vote on the economic bailout plan failed, it was plain to
see that the members of the House of Representatives, collectively speaking,
are not very bright. Many smart people on Wall Street and Main Street
were left scratching their heads. If the plan was not good enough to
pass, then why didn’t they come up with a solution that could
pass, rather than send a shock wave through an already teetering market?

The
answer is two-fold. Collectively, they don’t have enough economic
skills to come up with such a plan. Most of them could not run a successful
business if their life depended on it, so how could we expect them to
solve a real economic problem? And, an election is coming up and a majority
of those in tight races put their position as members of the House ahead
of everyone else in the country, self-serving to say the least but par
for the course.

Our
society has something terribly wrong. It is a dark day indeed when talking
heads on business cable channels have far more average intelligence
than the men and women being counted on to make tough leadership decisions
for our country and take effective action.

Within
the next 10 years, most likely sooner than later, a costly health care
crisis will come front and center and threaten the U.S. economy at least
as much as its current problems. Working on a solution based on identifying
the actual problems would ease the pain, and give us time to implement
better solutions than waiting until the last minute when hundreds of
billions are then needed just to put a Band-Aid on a totally broken
system. Like the current economic crisis, the handwriting is clearly
on the wall. Unlike the current crisis, the taxpayer billions will simply
be poured down a drain with no chance to recover anything. The problem
is far more serious than either presidential candidate cares to acknowledge,
as talking about it or how to actually solve it would cost lots of votes.

Big
Pharma fraud is rampant and not only needlessly killing Americans on
a daily basis, but racking up tens of billions of dollars in pointless
taxpayer expense. Will the government bail out Big Pharma as its sales
eventually collapse, putting taxpayers on the hook for more failed businesses?
Millions of baby boomers, many of whom by choice have not taken good
care of themselves, are entering the world of taxpayer-subsidized health
care known as Medicare. The younger generations cannot possibly foot
this bill. At the same time equally massive numbers of low income people,
many of whom suffer from self-induced obesity, are clamoring to be covered
by “socialized” health care. Once again, hard-working Americans
cannot possibly foot this bill. Currently, middle class Americans can
hardly afford health care for themselves and their families –
much less pay for all the people wanting a free handout. Where is the
money going to come from? The “rich” can’t pay for
everything.

Where
will our society draw a line between self-induced health care costs
and the obvious need to cover individuals who experience serious accidents
or medical problems beyond their control? Only in America can politicians
talk about health care while successfully ignoring every elephant in
the room. It is no surprise that the Big Pharma sponsored media gives
them a free pass. Politicians certainly can’t upset seniors, baby
boomers, or minorities – how could they win? Even worse, how can
they stay in power? It is a sad comment on the decline of the moral
fiber of a society when candidates pander to drooling constituents with
a plethora of free handouts – rather than debating actual issues
with all the cards and elephants on the table. We all need to be more
productive, not more entitled.

Another
aspect of this issue is that of health freedom, as your free access
to dietary supplements and natural remedies teeters on the brink of
extinction as CODEX, regional trade agreements, the FDA Trilateral Cooperation
Charter, and other “one world government” ideologies based
on “free trade” that isn’t free at all threaten to
undermine effective ways for you to take care of your own health.

Then
we could talk about how big business has nearly destroyed the quality
of our food supply. This scandal runs deep and has for decades. We have
the makers of junk food. We have the mass market farming operations
and food traders, which have destroyed family farms and communities,
while massively polluting the environment. These companies are delivering
disease-producing food to the American public and school lunch programs.
I’ll bet you can’t wait to eat a cloned-meat hamburger.

We
have chemical contamination of food with toxic and often experimental
pesticides. We have the Frankenfood movement, which genetically alters
food in a grand experiment on the nature of food itself – splicing
toxins into the essence of the food that everyone is supposed to eat
(all for the financial benefit of the biotech industry).

The
FDA and EPA are puppet organizations, utter failures in protecting the
public health, and little more than unelected government officials (often
on the take) acting as economic gatekeepers for those wishing to sell
toxic compounds as food or those wishing to further contaminate the
environment.

These
issues are intimately involved with the cause of cancer and heart disease
in this country – and would cost billions to fix – yet must
be fixed. Otherwise, we will end up spending the same billions on health
care.

These
are the kinds of issues we need government to solve, so as to improve
the health of all Americans. We do not need any more stupid public health
programs telling people to eat less and exercise more – everybody
already knows that. Our government could help by having guidelines that
force food companies to put real quality food on the table for Americans
to eat, while banning the sale of disease-producing additives that permeate
our current food supply – and doing its best to actually clean
up our environment to get nasty pollution out of our food supply.

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Alas,
all you need do is look at the ineptitude of Congress to solve any problem,
even when it hits them in the face as a crisis, and you can see that
you have little choice but to take your health and the health of your
family into your own hands. Congressional “solutions,” at
least those currently existing and those on the drawing board, will
do little more than create another huge economic crisis while pitting
Americans against Americans in class and generation warfare. Your best
plan is to not need any healthcare because you are healthy. This requires
a lot of hard work and doing the right things more often than not. There
is no easy path to staying healthy as you age – but there is a
path.

We
already know those in Congress can point fingers; can they look in a
mirror? Will any real leaders please stand up?

Updated
on October 4, 2008
After the House and Senate passed the bailout, with the following:

It is anyone’s best guess if the Band-Aid bailout placed on America’s
bleeding economy will provide enough temporary relief for Americans
to get busy and work our ways out of this hole. The weak underlying
fundamentals in our economy indicate this could be a couple of years
of tough sledding.

You would think the very first priority of Congress would be to cut
back unnecessary spending. Instead, we saw the Senate “solve”
the gridlock in the House by turning the bill into a Christmas tree
of favors to all their wealthy friends (as I mentioned above, that is
how they operate). Every well-funded lobby in Washington had its hands
held out, creating what turned out to be pork-barrel gone wild. Such
a once in a lifetime package of handouts was clearly more than the House
could resist.

A bill based on the merits of the issue was not passed. Instead, a 700
billion dollar taxpayer check was turned over to Henry Paulson. On Friday
the New York Times reported that in 2004 Paulson, along with four of
his other top banking friends, were responsible for manipulating the
SEC into relaxing standards for the amount of money in a bank’s
reserve that has directly caused this crisis. Bush confided in July,
when he mistakenly thought he was not being recorded, “There's
no question about it. Wall Street got drunk – that’s one
of the reasons I asked you to turn off the TV cameras – it got
drunk and now it's got a hangover.” And it was Bush, in 2006,
who hired the drunken Paulson to be Treasury Secretary, the man who
will now oversee the bailout.

I can’t help but mentioning the 100 billion dollar bailout given
to Big Pharma as a totally unnecessary addition to this bailout. Big
Pharma is an industry teetering on the brink of collapse from its own
fraud and criminal behavior of many of its executives. It made me sick
to my stomach as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle praised the Mental
Health Parity addition to the financial bailout, presenting it as benevolent
and helpful to the disadvantaged (what a joke). Over the next five years
this will keep Big Pharma going, as they will be able to sell their
injurious and deadly brain medications to elderly and children at taxpayer
expense. 90% of Big Pharma sales are fraudulent, inflating the cost
of health care for one and all. The Big Pharma lobby runs the Senate,
so what would you expect.

The cancer within our government runs very deep. At the core of the
disease are unelected bureaucrats in positions of financial power. Elected
officials are all too eager to pass laws and delegate authority to people
who have no right to be making the kinds of decisions they do. This
cancer permeates the SEC, FDA, EPA, and most likely many other aspects
of government. We used to call this the “revolving door,”
when managers within these government agencies would do favors for those
they are supposed to regulate and then go on to take high paying jobs
in those companies later.

The cancer has spread and it is no longer just a revolving door, it
has become a revolving chair. The head of the FDA is busy working deals
for Big Pharma and Big Biotech while pretending to be interested in
consumer safety and shooting consumers in the back on legal rights.
The EPA management has cleansed itself of scientists daring to suggest
the clean up of anything, like the perchlorate that injures babies across
the country on a daily basis. And the Treasury Secretary will be doling
out favors to all his drunken friends, while pretending to watch out
for the tax payer. Scum no longer has to switch jobs, swiveling in a
chair to a different phone is all that is required. Don’t count
on Congress to investigate anything beyond a hand slap, as we would
quickly discover the true Kings of the revolving chair.

Byron
J. Richards, Board-Certified Clinical Nutritionist, nationally-renowned
nutrition
expert, and founder of Wellness
Resources is a leader in advocating the value of dietary
supplements as a vital tool to maintain health. He is an outspoken
critic of government and Big Pharma efforts to deny access to natural
health products and has written extensively on the life-shortening and
health-damaging failures of the sickness
industry.